I’ve always felt that MM has a lot going for it. Most of the traits are in Death Magic and Blood Magic so durability comes as standard, and there are a couple of different choices you can make in your traits to fit your play style or to suit the content you’re doing. And unlike condition based builds you’re not tied to one set of weapons which again opens up options to customise the play style to your liking.
Bas.7406The reason a majority don’t play minions has nothing to do with whether they are strong or not. It’s simply they feel there are better or more useful utility choices
I know many Necro’s haven’t, yet, tried an MM build or have tried minions while leveling and written them off as being useless, untraited, they can be quite poor. There are also plenty who aren’t using them in favour of other builds which supposedly give you more flexibility in utility skills. Its often remarked on these forums that Necro builds are defined by their utility skill choices. With that said the MM build does have to make the choice of which minions are better for which situations, or even to drop one entirely for another skill. Choosing to drop a minion should be, and is, a valid decision in the right circumstances.
The build itself is very strong for solo and small group play, solo play especially,
and the fact that Minions don’t scale with player stats make it fantastic for fresh 80’s. Furthermore the lack of scaling allows you to use almost any combination of stats you choose and still be successful. (Great for Magic Find gear!)
Since allowing minions to benefit from Agony, their survival in Fractals has been acceptable so far. Old Tom in the Unorganised Fractal and the is the only really minion unfriendly boss, with good positioning they tend to manage everything else fairly well. I don’t find myself having to resummon a ranged minion any more often I have to revive another player, melee minions need resummoning more often but its very rare that I find myself in a situation where all my minions are dead at once.
Sadly however its held back by a couple of AI issues, and while these are not exclusive to the Necromancer, I do feel we get hit the hardest by them. Unlike the Ranger we have no way of ordering our minions to attack, and unlike the Mesmer we’re not able to produce lots of them to make up for the ones that break. Some minions are more reliable than others, I notice the Blood Fiend and Flesh Wurm seem to reliably assist me while my Flesh Golem spends most of its time standing around. There are some workarounds for these but they’re still not guaranteed to work. Its been suggested plenty of times that we should have some degree of control over them, and I agree on that point. Nothing too extreme but being able to order them to “Kill” or “Stop killing” or even “Put both halves of that Dredge down right now!” would go a long way.
It has also been in my experience quite a weak spec when it comes to WvW, and AoE heavy events, where the minions are likely to be dead before they even manage to reach a target. However I don’t see this as being a “problem” as such, I see it as being the trade off for being such a fantastic solo spec. I’m sure others would disagree here, but I think having one build which is universally good in all aspects of play would be detrimental to the Necro. We have such a wide and varied amount of viable builds that we should be encouraged to try them out.